translated by Chloe Haralambous - Moira Egan

The perforation on your white neck
Like lace that covers the table
You watched coolly as our generation
Reached the cliff, step by step, splitting

Hairs,life,on one side,
like chiaroscuro in Flemish portraits
Imprisoned, lifers of later
We wait for it, it never comes

Sparrows run in vacant gardens
In the sky Dublin's gulls caw
The things you want and the things you say
Multiply questions like cancerous cells

Now that the world has become transparent
You want to speak with it in silence
So no one else will hear you
So you can sleep and tuck in your soul

But every night will waken with it hurts
With two screens for mother and lover
How can a bare sentiment be pronounced
And what of the lost warmth of words?

  Austerity measures, The New Greek Poetry, edited by Karen van Dyck, Penguin Books, UK, 2016